Media Mentions

When a Norwegian committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) for its work behind a treaty to ban nuclear weapons, 3,500 miles away six people at Harvard cheered loudly. They had reason to celebrate. Bonnie Docherty, associate director of armed conflict and civilian protection, and clinical instructor Anna Crowe, who teach at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School (HLS), and four law students had taken part in the treaty negotiations spearheaded by ICAN, a Geneva-based international coalition of organizations from more than 100 countries...“The negotiations were timely and urgent,” said Docherty. “It reminded the world of the need to take tangible steps for nuclear disarmament. The treaty banning nuclear weapons will make a real difference in the world.”

At a time when American politics are beset by deep divisions and regular paralysis, five U.S. senators told a Harvard Law School (HLS) audience Friday that there is real reason for concern, yet some hope for their institution and the country. Returning to a school where all had graduated or taught, Democratic senators Tim Kaine, J.D. ’83, of Virginia, Jack Reed, J.D. ’82, of Rhode Island, and Mark Warner, J.D. ’80, of Virginia, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, ’98, J.D. ’02, of Arkansas, and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a former HLS professor, also urged students to help solve the nation’s challenges.

An op-ed by Ramy Khouili and Daniel Levine-Spound [`19]. For LGBTIQ Tunisians, abusive police-stops and arbitrary arrests at the hands of law enforcement are commonplace, while anti-gay hate speech and incitement to homophobic violence appear frequently in Tunisian media. After receiving several complaints, the Tunisian Independent High Authority for Audiovisual Communication (HAICA) – in what can be considered the first official reaction from a public institution to violence against the LGBTIQ community – issued a warning against a TV station for homophobic statements in October, 2015.

An interview with Cass Sunstein. With special counsel Robert Mueller bringing federal charges against two former advisers to President Trump’s campaign, and a campaign foreign policy adviser pleading guilty to lying about efforts to obtain damaging information from the Russians about Hillary Clinton, what was once inconceivable has become a little less so. Should evidence eventually emerge of possible criminal activity involving Trump himself, analysts say, Congress might have to ponder opening the impeachment process against him, as it last did against President Bill Clinton in 1998. Few clauses in the U.S. Constitution are as mysterious or as misunderstood by Americans as impeachment, and that’s unfortunate, contends Cass R. Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School.

Is the Papadopoulos case the real bombshell of the day? While the initial announcement of indictments against President Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and Manafort associate Rick Gates dominated the news early Monday morning, the allegations against them did not go directly to the question of whether Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russians, who wanted to tip the 2016 election to Trump. But a second case made public later Monday did — and court records show the target in that matter is cooperating with federal investigators...Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law professor who is a former federal prosecutor and former investigations coordinator at the International Criminal Court, said that while Papadopoulos “seems to be cooperating,” the ultimate trajectory of the probe remains unclear. “Whether people will be charged with collusion, whether more senior officials will be charged, we just don’t know at this stage,” Whiting said.

The Post reports that former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI investigators in the Robert S. Mueller III probe. That is a big deal, bigger perhaps than the announced indictments of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, whose alleged crimes did not directly implicate anyone in the campaign, let alone President Trump. We see for the first time the words “Donald J. Trump” in a federal criminal plea bargain...To some legal experts, it looks as though Papadopoulos is now cooperating with Mueller. Constitutional law guru Laurence Tribe says to “keep in mind that ‘collusion’ isn’t a term of art in the criminal law lexicon but a concept more pertinent to impeachment.” He adds, “It seems to me that the guilty plea today by ex-Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, evidently cooperating with Mueller on his investigation … is likely to be the sleeper in today’s outpouring of news.”

One out of six U.S. Supreme Court justices attended Harvard Law. As the school celebrates its 200th anniversary, six of those justices attended a panel where they remembered their time as students.

An interview with Noah Feldman. The first charges in the Russia investigation. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and an associate surrender to the FBI, while another campaign adviser pleads guilty -- we'll look at what it means.

After 5 1/2 months of speculation, anticipation and, in some cases, dread, Americans on Monday learned of the first charges in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign...What does all this mean for Mueller’s ongoing investigation—and for President Trump himself, who has called the probe a “witch hunt”?...[Alex Whiting]: The question on many people’s minds today upon hearing the news that Manafort and Gates have been charged will be: Where is this headed? And the answer is, we (the public) do not know, and Mueller may not know either. We do not know whether we are at the beginning, middle or end of this story, and we won’t know until the investigation has had a chance to fully play itself out.

Although the speakers were U.S. Supreme Court justices who routinely rule on the nation’s most serious issues, it was a jolly affair. Six high-court judges, five current and one retired, gathered Thursday evening to talk about their former lives as law students, about the lessons they learned, the classes they favored, and the memories they cherished from the years before they sat on the highest court in the land. Laid back and genial, the justices, all graduates of Harvard Law School (HLS), engaged in a roundtable conversation with fellow alumnus Dean John Manning ’82, J.D. ’85, before a packed house at Sanders Theatre to mark the beginning of the celebrations of the School’s 200th anniversary.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. So now we know how this game of Clue starts: Paul Manafort with a wire transfer in the parlor. But Democrats who are getting revved up for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to follow the money from Russia to Donald Trump’s campaign shouldn’t get too excited, at least not yet. The indictment of Manafort and his associate Rick Gates means that this investigation is going deep into the weeds. Once it’s there, it could become permanently entangled with arcane bank accounts, front companies with weird names and pro-Russian Ukrainians with even more unpronounceable names.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When we think about the framers of the Constitution and how they handled the issue of race, we conjure up the extremes: the hypocrites and the heroes. At one end is Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that “all men are created equal” but believed Africans were inferior and fathered children with an enslaved woman. At the other end is Alexander Hamilton, who, at least as depicted by admirers like the biographer Ron Chernow and the playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, was an ardent abolitionist. This framing, however, is simplistic and misleading.

The Education Department is considering only partially forgiving federal loans for students defrauded by for-profit colleges, according to department officials, abandoning the Obama administration's policy of erasing that debt..."Anything other than full cancellation is not a valid outcome," said Eileen Connor, a litigator at Harvard University's Project on Predatory Student Lending, which has represented hundreds of defrauded students of the now-shuttered Corinthian Colleges. "The nature of the wrong that was done to them, the harm is even bigger than the loans that they have."

A majority of Supreme Court justices reached across the ideological—and generational—divide Thursday to rule that their alma mater, Harvard Law School, totally rules. “The Harvard justices who preceded those on this stage, from Joseph Story to Antonin Scalia, have had an oversize influence on the law,” Chief Justice John Roberts, class of 1979, told a crowd of scholars, students and alumni gathered at Harvard’s Memorial Hall to celebrate the professional school’s bicentennial. Justices Anthony Kennedy (’61), Stephen Breyer (’64), Elena Kagan (’86) and Neil Gorsuch (’91), joined by retired Justice David Souter (’66), concurred. Then, under the gentle questioning of the law school dean, John Manning, the justices reminisced about law-school days, poked fun at one another (and their Yale-educated colleagues) and imagined dinner-table conversations with long-deceased predecessors. Although light in substance, the program gave a glimpse of the justices’ wit and personalities away from the solemn and sometimes somniferous legal points they make in oral arguments at the court.

Thousands of alumni, students, and faculty crowded Harvard Law School’s lecture halls and meeting rooms Friday for a full day of sessions with senators, judges, and renowned legal scholars to celebrate the school’s 200th birthday. The Law School, which was founded in 1817, has already hosted a series of events this year celebrating this milestone...Richard Lazarus, a Law School professor and the chair of the bicentennial programming, said the aim of the event was to celebrate the Law School with action, rather than reflection. “The basic aim and goal of the October summit is basically to celebrate the Law School, but not to celebrate the Law School by reflecting on how wonderful Harvard Law School is, but by kind of being wonderful,” Lazarus said...Rebecca A. Vastola [`20], a first-year law student who attended the Senators’ event, said that the focus on government and public interest speakers was especially appealing to her. “I think it’s an incredible opportunity, for those of us that this is corresponding with our first year at Harvard,” Vastola said.

The first six agenda items for next month’s Vanguard shareholder meeting cover riveting topics such as the appointment of trustees, service agreements, and the investment objectives of certain index funds. The seventh and final item concerns genocide. That got serious in a hurry. A group of activists is asking Vanguard to adopt a new policy to avoid buying stock in companies that “substantially contribute to genocide or crimes against humanity.”...“This meeting and this resolution comes at a unique moment,” said Stephen Davis, associate director of Harvard Law School’s Programs on Corporate Governance and Institutional Investors. Vanguard and its competitors “have really begun to take environmental, social, and governance issues seriously as investment risks.”

The role of general counsel has evolved to the point now where they have “the access, influence, power and resources” to advance social justice causes, Kim Rivera, chief legal officer and general counsel of HP Inc., said Friday at a Harvard Law School bicentennial event. But that wasn’t always the case...During a panel discussion titled “In-House Revolution,” Rivera and general counsels Horacio Gutierrez of Spotify, Deirdre Stanley of Thomson Reuters and Laura Stein of The Clorox Co., said encouraging their legal teams and the law firms with whom they work to get involved in social justice issues is “the right thing to do.”

We’re treated to fresh reports nearly every day about how Facebook Inc.’s efforts to keep bad actors from abusing its platform fall short...While the current Congress is loath to mint new regulations, that hasn’t stopped Sens. John McCain (R., Ariz.), Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and Mark Warner (D., Va.) from proposing the Honest Ads Act, which would force internet companies to tell users who funded political ads...The new bill is an obvious way to bring the tech giants in line with other media, with whom they clearly now compete, says Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor and co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

There are 194 Democrats in the House, and another 46 Democrats in the Senate. But since Donald Trump took office, 22 state attorneys general have played among the most pivotal roles slowing and stopping the march of the Trump agenda. Nineteen state AGs sued to stop the administration from withholding Obamacare subsidies from states, 16 to halt the rollback of environmental regulations, and 20 to reverse its decision to rescind a program that had protected young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children from deportation..."The more AGs act like congressmen, the more they'll be treated like congressmen," says James Tierney, a former Democratic attorney general of Maine and a lecturer at Harvard Law School who's carved a niche consulting both Republican and Democratic AGs and studying the office he once held. "It's endangering the very function of attorney general."

...More than 400,000 Americans die annually in part because of avoidable medical errors, according to a 2013 estimate published in the Journal of Patient Safety. In 2008, the most recent year studied, medical errors cost the country $19.5 billion, most of which was spent on extra care and medication, according to another report. If a problem such as Thompson's stemmed from negligence, a malpractice lawsuit may be an option. But lawyers who collect only when there's a settlement or a victory may not take on a case unless it's exceptionally clear that the doctor or hospital was at fault. That creates a Catch-22, said John Goldberg, a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert in tort law. "We'll never know if something has happened because of malpractice," he said, "because it's not financially viable to bring a lawsuit." That leaves the patient responsible for extra costs.

Harvard Law School has produced 20 Supreme Court justices in its storied history and six of them traveled to Boston on Thursday for a lively and at times buoyant celebration.It wasn't lost on Chief Justice John Roberts that a majority of the current court hails from one elite law school."A minority of my colleagues send their regrets," Roberts joked to the audience.The Chief was joined on stage by Justices Anthony Kennedy ('61), Stephen Breyer ('64), Elena Kagan ('86), Neil Gorsuch ('91) as well as retired Justice David Souter ('66).Between them, they have covered a four-decade span at the school and they had some stories to tell...John F. Manning, the Dean of the School, posed questions to the group, and saved a lightning round for the end that featured everything from Gorsuch's revelation about a former pet goat named "Nibbles," to an unfortunate summer job when a youthful Justice Kennedy mistakenly nailed his work glove to a post.